Front Cover

Title Page

Contents, List of Illustrations

Preface

"Leukemia Cluster: Tungsten Level High in Urine.” A 2002 headline from the
Las Vegas Review-Journal alarmed residents of Fallon, Nevada, sixty miles east
of Reno, a community in Churchill County surrounded by military facilities,
farms, and old mines. Further investigations by the federal Centers for Disease
Control, however, found no clear evidence of a link between the community’s ...

Acknowledgments

Th e idea for this book originated more than a few years ago, when I was serving
the dual role of professor of history and archivist at the University of
Pacific. On a research trip to Sonora, California, I met Mrs. Mary Etta Segerstrom,
daughter- in- law of Charles H. Segerstrom. She first introduced me to
the monumental accumulation of corporate records, correspondence, and
other documents that make up the central files of the Nevada- Massachusetts ...

Chapter 1. STEEL ALLOYS AND THE RISE OF MODERN INDUSTRY

If steel is a critical building block of modern industry, tungsten is an essential
component of modern steel alloys. Steelmaking has an ancient history,
but making steel harder by adding tungsten is a commercial process barely
a century old. Introducing the evolving technologies and industries that led
to tungsten’s economic development provides historical context, and helps
explain how and why one modest Nevada mining company rose to national ...

Chapter 2. TUNGSTEN IN WORLD WAR I

In the two decades before the First World War, steel alloys had revolutionized
the machine tool industry and altered the course of modern industrial
development. Aft er 1914 steel alloys changed the course of war. Copper, lead,
zinc, aluminum, iron, and other metals were all enlisted as never before in the
global struggle that followed the Sarajevo crisis, but to many contemporary
observers the “key metal” of World War I was tungsten. From 1914 through the ...

Chapter 3. FROM PACIFIC TUNGSTEN TO NEVADA-MASSACHUSETTS

American tungsten producers did not share in the corporate gains that characterized
much of the economy during the Roaring Twenties. Except for a
few operators still working to fulfill old orders, tungsten mining in the United
States virtually died in 1919 and did not revive for nearly five years. First of
the larger operators to close was Pacific Tungsten. With a mismanaged mill,
no operating capital, and a mountain of debt, it folded in January. Next to go ...

Chapter 4. TUNGSTEN AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The formative years of the Nevada- Massachusetts Company ended just as
America’s greatest economic crisis began. Instead of better times, the tungsten
business slid downhill along with the rest of American industry aft er the market
crash in the fall of 1929. Th rough the decade of uncertainty and upheaval
that followed, Charles Segerstrom managed his affairs with remarkable resilience
and pragmatic adaptation to change. In the process his company not ...

Chapter 5. MINING AND MARKETING DURING THE NEW DEAL

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered one of America’s greatest presidents,
yet history has been hard on New Deal domestic programs. Most scholars
agree that despite all the governmental stimuli designed to raise production,
prices, and wages, recovery remained elusive until aft er the rearmament rush
as the world geared up for another war. Businessmen did not need the perspective ...

Chapter 6. STRATEGIC METALS AT THE START OF WORLD WAR II

"The situation is very unsettled and no one knows what is going to happen in
the next few weeks. Th e lid may be blown off the whole thing in Europe if Germany
starts in with Poland and then we don’t know what will happen.”1 ...

Chapter 7. AMERICAN WARTIME METAL POLICY AND PRACTICE

America’s belated entry into World War II changed the focus if not the scope
of national security. Before Pearl Harbor, the chief aims of policy makers had
been to mobilize the military to keep American shores safe and spur industry
to keep Britain in the war. During the two- year conversion to a wartime
economy, government planners had imposed a series of “mechanisms” to
encourage greater production of war goods, prevent or off set labor and ...

Chapter 8. NEVADA-MASSACHUSETTS IN WORLD WAR II

Though distant from political and economic centers of wartime decision making,
Charles H. Segerstrom kept careful track of events from his company
headquarters on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Unless on a business
trip he was never far from the teletype machines that connected his office in
Sonora with the Nevada mines and his eastern brokerage in New York. An
inveterate reader and writer, whenever he had a free minute he scanned and ...

Epilogue

As a corporate entity, the Nevada- Massachusetts Company lasted more than
fifty years. For the first thirty Charles H. Segerstrom Sr. was president and
chief executive officer. He essentially raised the company out of the ashes of its
predecessor, Pacific Tungsten, and he remained its primary source of inspiration
and leadership through the critical thirties and early forties. Under his
management the company successfully anticipated and adjusted to dynamic ...

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